1998_2 |
Elizabeth
Birmingham
Reframing
the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and
African American Rhetoric as a Space for Cultural
Critique
1The Language of Post-Modern
Architecture, first published in 1977, Charles Jencks
proclaims the death of high modernism. In doing so, he is
able to time that death to the momentthe cloudless
July 15 in 1972 when the first three building of St.
Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex were
dynamited. Indeed, Jencks is even able to provide the
cause of death: the inability of this architectural
style to create livable environments for the poor, in
great part because the poor are not the nuanced and
sophisticated "readers" of architectural space
the educated architects were.1 There are
several elements of this myth worth noting: that the
Pruitt-Igoe's failure is noted and remembered as an
architectural failurea design flaw, wrought upon
the unsophisticated poor by well-meaning intellectuals.
What issues are not discussed in this myth are issues of
racethe over 10,000 residents of Pruitt-Igoe were
98% African Americanand issues of poverty. Though
clearly the occupants of public housing are poor, the
residents of Pruitt-Igoe were the poorest of the poor,
with an annual median family income of $2,454 and a
family including, on average, a mother and 4.28 children.2
Jencks notes with some
postmodern irony, "Previously it [Pruitt-Igoe] had
been vandalized, mutilated and defaced by its black
inhabitants, and although millions of dollars were pumped
back, trying to keep it alive (fixing broken elevators,
repairing smashed windows, repainting), it was finally
put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom" (9). Jencks
mentions race only in conjunction with the implication
that the tenants of Pruitt-Igoe were uncivilized and
destructivethe problems of Pruitt-Igoe are linked
to bad behavior, not poverty and hopelessness. Moreover,
the problems at the project are blamed on the destructive
tenants, not on the minimal upkeep of the project by the
Housing Authority. Jencks's myth has taken on a life of
its own, in spite of several serious inaccuracies, and
has become the central story in explaining the
"death" of High Modernism.
2This ascendant myth about
Pruitt-Igoe in discussions of modern architecture since
Jencks follows a similar line of reasoning, suggesting
that although modern architecture often sought
non-referentiality, that goal was perhaps so at odds with
a human need to make meaning through reference that those
experiencing the architectural products of the modern
movement had to re-encode the structures in order to read
themto make meaning of them. Therefore, that
modernist desire to re-encode (or perhaps un-code) the
built environment fell flat as the coding system of the
architects came into conflict with the code (or
signifying system) of the populace. According to Brent
Brolin in The Failure of Modern Architecture:
In spite of the
generally held belief fostered by modern
architecture that technological societies share a
common cultural denominator, each culture retains
strong links to its own past. One way of
expressing these connections is through visual
traditions, but these have been intentionally
excluded from modern cities throughout the world.
The spiritual loss is real and people of all
cultures sense it. (12)
Brolin's response, typical
of the contemporary reactions against modern
architecture, is in many ways equally universalizing,
asserting that "all" people are likely to
respond negatively to the modern city and read modern
architecture as sterile. Moreover, Brolin simply
rearticulates Charles Jenck's myth that modern
architecture failed its constituency, "the
people." Nowhere, the story goes, was this failure
more apparent than in the conflicts surrounding St.
Louis's Pruitt-IgoeMinoru Yamasaki's public housing
project that became a monument to despair for its
residents and a sign to contemporary theorists of the
"failure of modern architecture."3
The ascendant narrative has articulated these messages so
persuasively that the story barely changes from source to
source, with many sources retaining even Jencks' original
inaccuracies, and certainly his too-quickly drawn
conclusions. In this paper then, I take on the ascendant
myth that traces the failure of high modernism to the
demolition of Pruitt-Igoe by asserting that the focus on
poor people's inability to "read" high
modernism, and hence Pruitt-Igoe, is not simply shifting
the grounds of an argument that needs to about race and
poverty. It is also simply wrong. The residents of
Pruitt-Igoe read and de-coded that housing project
perfectly, recognizing it for what it wasan urban
reservation which had the effect of containing and
segregating those residents from the rest of the city and
the city's resources.
3I want to be neither an apologist
for modern architecture nor do I wish to blame it for
Pruitt-Igoe's failure. Clearly, architectural programs
are bound up in the same racist ideologies that affect
the rest of our cultureas Jenck's statement
suggestand perhaps high modernism, as an arguably
elitist proposition, is worthy of particular examination
and critique.4 However, viewing the problems
of Pruitt-Igoe as design flaws is simply a way of
avoiding serious questions of the complex entanglement
structural racism has with our built environments.
Catharine Bristol writes that it is problematic of
architectural critics to "attribute of the problems
of public housing to architectural failure, and propose
as a solution a new approach to design. They do not in
any significant way acknowledge the political-economic
and social context for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe"
(170). As Henri Lefebvre asserts in The Production of
Space, "Authentic knowledge of space must
address the question of its production." These
questions of the how's and why's of Pruitt-Igoe's
production have been erased from the discussion by
focusing on design issues rather than the
socio-historical moment at which Pruitt-Igoe was
produced.
The Modernist Vision
4International Modernism in
architecture is closely linked to modernist movements in
a variety of fieldsits goal was a rational, even
scientific approach informed in part by a popular but
imperfect conception of evolution. This teleological view
suggested that progress toward a perfected world was
inevitable, making the past obsolete. In addition, it led
to beliefs about functionalismthat only the
necessary, functional parts of structures should survive.
There are several other elements informing modernist
structures like Pruitt-Igoe that warrant being discussed
in greater detail, because although the negative impact
of these schemes has been indicted after the fact, it is
as important to contextualize the theories that informed
modernism as is it to deconstruct their impact.
Describing the architectural theory that informed this
period of urban history points to the ways in which
planners rearticulated the assumed superiority of the
dominant culture.
The idealistic rationality
that underlies the modernist vision in architecture can
be traced in part to Le Corbusier's theories that combine
two very different, and perhaps even opposite theoretical
strands. His idealism and attendant willingness to strive
for a better future grew from his Calvinist education,
his brush with Nietzschean elitism through Frank Lloyd
Wright, and his reading of Ernest Renan's Life of
Jesus which convinced him he was a "tragic
revolutionary martyr come to redeem the world through
architecture" (Kruft 396) which led him to approach
his work with an evangelistic zeal. Like Christian
evangelism, this idealism caught fire within the
architectural community and architects' work took on
"moral" aspects, often in the form of ascribing
moral characteristics to matters of taste and assuming
universalized ideas of "good." The second
theoretical strand of rationalism seems to have come
through the architectural treatises of Viollet-let-Duc
(who in turn was influenced by Descartes and the Port
Royalists) which attributed beauty to geometric purity
and was central to the development of the modernists'
aesthetic preferences for the sleek surfaces of the
machine and their foundations in scientific rationality.
This uneasy marriage of theoretical impulses underscored
the work of many modernist architects and resulted in
visible tension between the twin goals of rational
expression and architecture for the "people."
Modern architecture grew from the rationalist assertions
that human beings and their needs, desires, and responses
were universally similar. By proclaiming democracy and
equality through the built environment, these architects
hoped to shape the inhabitants of that environment into
the beings the architecture asserted they were. This idea
suggested that good or enlightened buildings would elicit
similar attitudes or behaviors in individuals interacting
with those buildings. This goal was quickly co-opted by
capitalist interests 5 that supported
widespread post-war urban renewal of the sort that
occurred in St. Louis in the 1950's.
Pruitt-Igoe and the
Modernist Vision
5The United States Housing Act of
1949 provided the federal moneys for urban redevelopment
and slum removal that led to the design of Pruitt-Igoe by
architect Minoru Yamasaki of the firm Leinweber, Yamasaki
& Hellmuth. The housing project, located on a 57 acre
site, consisted of 33 eleven-story, flat-topped apartment
blocks sited to incorporate Le Corbusier's "three
essential joys of urbanism: sun, space, and
greenery." Pruitt-Igoe was meant to be
surrounded by a "river of trees" winding
through the open spaces and connecting the project to the
surrounding neighborhoods, as Yamasaki told Architectural
Forum in 1951. The almost brutally spare, unadorned
surfaces were to reflect the dissolution of the old
hierarchies that made luxuriously superfluous decoration
a demarcator of wealth. The repetition of apartment after
apartment opening to "streets in the air" where
tenants and their children would be safe from traffic was
said to be modeled on the metaphor of the hospitala
safe, hygienic, and healthful environment (Russell 23).
In early discussions of the project, like the one in Architectural
Forum, features like open galleries and skip-stop
elevators were hailed as "patentable"
innovations that would help create
"neighborhoods," even in the highest density
public housing ever built in the U.S. The 12,000
inhabitants housed within a few city blocks created a
small city within the larger city. Galleries were
envisioned as places for children to play, mothers to
meet for conversation and laundry, and places to store
items such as bicycles. The early drawings depict
middle-class white women strolling in plant-filled,
sunlit galleries pushing baby carriages.
By making the text of Pruitt-Igoe read clean, safe, and
democratic, Yamasaki desired to instill those same
qualities in the housing project's inhabitants.
Galleries, open horizontal space every third floor, 11 x
85' and oriented south, created spaces for
neighborhood-like interaction among tenants, while
skip-stop elevators, elevators stopping only at gallery
floors, (and requiring tenants to walk up or down stairs
to their apartments), assured that the gallery space
would be used. In addition, laundry and open air drying
facilities were also placed on gallery levels, as was
space for storage. The design called for screening along
the galleries to allow for "summer breezes,"
but shutters to "block winter winds"
("Slum Surgery" 131). Such a space was meant to
encourage interaction among tenants, safe spaces for
children and families, and clean, sunlit areas for
recreation and neighborhood life.
6As designed in 1951, the project
was segregated, with 1/3 the housing meant for whites
(Pruitt) and 2/3 meant for African Americans (Igoe).
However, before the project was finished, the Supreme
Court handed down their decision ending segregation,
which in practice (though not principal) guaranteed
Pruitt-Igoe would house only African Americans, as whites
could not be convinced to move into the project. Moneys
for the project began to dry up immediately.6
Much of Yamasaki's design was altered based on a new lack
of fundshis original design called for both the
high-rises and garden apartments at a density of 30 per
acre. Yamasaki explained that the housing authority
forced him to double the density: "The best we could
do," he said, "was to eliminate the low rise
and add more slabs" (Bailey 23). In addition, as the
population was increased, money for landscaping and any
services (public spaces like gyms, playgrounds, a
proposed grocery, even public bathrooms) disappeared. The
only public structure left was a "community
center" where housing authority offices were set up
to collect rent and administrate the project. Architect
Gyo Obata, who worked with Yamasaki, recalls that
"[Yamasaki] tried and fought at every turn [for
amenities]" (Bailey 23). The result though, was a
housing project that represented to its tenants a system
of powerful control because it encoded racist messages by
isolating and containing a population that was 98%
African-American. Not only did the tenants clearly decode
very different meanings than the architects had hoped to
encode, a claim that will be discussed in detail later in
this paper, but in fewer than two decades architectural
critics moved from hailing the structure's embodiment of
democratic ideals to indicting it as a "Eurocentric,
Enlightenment-driven product of capitalism" (Kruft
440).
Structural Racism and
Architectural Analysis
7Contemporary architectural critics
are particularly poised to engage the public in the sorts
of critique that may begin to reshape the built
environment. According to Cornel West, the United States
is facing a complex cultural crisis to which postmodern
architectural critics have responded inadequately with
their focus on the symbolic content of architecture
rather than architecture's "failure of vision [that]
must be unpacked by means of structural and institutional
analyses" (Keeping Faith 47). Part of this
failure of vision has been the unwillingness to analyze
structures beyond buildingsthe larger social and
economic forces that shape those buildings. West sees the
influence of Foucault and Derrida as signs of deep (and
positive) changes taking place in architectural
criticism, suggesting:
The major virtue
of the French invasion is that new possibilities,
heretofore unforeclosed, are unleashed; the vice
is that architectural critics lose their identity
and focus primarily on academicist perspectives
on the larger crisis of our culturea focus
that requires a deeper knowledge of history,
economics, sociology and so on than most
architectural critics have or care to pursue. My
point here is not that this task should be
abandoned by architectural critics. Rather, I am
claiming that what architectural critics do
knowthe specificity of the diverse
traditions of architectural practicesshould
inform how we understand the present cultural
crisis. (Keeping Faith: 50)
West goes on to describe
the ways in which architectural critics should be
especially able to analyze the "structural and
institutional dynamics of power" (Keeping Faith: 50).
He offers no framework with which critics can take up
this project, but only asserts that the project must
focus on the demystification of the modernist proposition
and must reach deeper than what Derrida would call the
"surfaces of emergence" to deconstruct the
binaries of power relationships (white, black; man,
woman; modern, primitive; etc.) without simply inverting
the hierarchical relationship in the pair.
8This paper then, is one of inquiry
and exploration, a loose structure of corridors that seem
to open into too many as yet unfinished rooms. My central
claim is that the simplistic indictments of the
modernist/rationalist propositions that informed
Pruitt-Igoe do not provide an adequate lens for
critiquing Pruitt-Igoe as site of conflict about not an
architectural program alone but about any program's
complex entanglement with structural racism. By
suggesting that the problem of Pruitt-Igoe was a flawed
design, theorists like Jencks shifted the discussion,
disallowing interrogation of deeply embedded chasms of
political, economic and social inequality.
African-American cultural critics (Cornel West, bell
hooks, Michael Eric Dyson, Marlon Riggs) have used the
term "structural" racism to describe the ways
in which racism is so deeply encoded in American
society's structure as to seem natural. Cornel West
implies that structural racism acknowledges that the
relationship between structural constraints on black
opportunities and behavioral impediments to black
mobility are complex and entwined (Race Matters 11-12).
Michael Eric Dyson expands this definition in Reflecting
Black by describing "the complex ways in which
everyday racism is structured, produced, and sustained in
multifarious social practices, cultural traditions, and
intellectual justifications" (30).
These authors often evoke
the language of neo-Marxist cultural critics like Stuart
Hall and Lawrence Grossberg in attempting to explain how
racist messages can become so "tenaciously"
linked to meanings beyond themselves that they take on a
power that disempowers individuals and provides meanings
so entrenched in the cultural consciousness as to seem
natural. Explanations of this tenacity try to account for
the ways in which racism has become a
"structural" conceptual scheme, functioning
within many levels of our society. Hall applies his
critique to racist structures, which he claims are
articulated by "'inferential racism' the apparently
naturalized representation of events and situations
relating to race, whether factual or 'fictional,' which
have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them
as a set of unquestioned assumptions" (48).
9I use the word
"structural" to suggest all these things and
more. I am using it as a metaphorI'm signifying in
Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s sense, "calling out" as
bell hooks would have it, "creating a cultural space
that would promote rigorous analysis" (Dialectically
Down 57). I am attempting to enlarge the discussion
of what "structural" racism is by suggesting
that while it is inarguably to be found within the
structures of American society at all levels, it can be
found equally in the discreet infrastructures and
structures of our communities. Though Pruitt-Igoe was a
physical structure, in this paper it acts as a metaphor
for structural racisma structure that deepened
pre-existing chasms standing between African-Americans
and cultural integrity, political power and
educational/economic opportunity because its premises and
"encoded" messages were inscribed with the
unquestioned assumptions of structural racism.
To explore the relations among language,
"structure," and architecture, I consider
several related issues. I begin by describing a framework
that opens a space for architectural critique based in
the tropes of African-American rhetoric, specifically the
ideas of literary and cultural critic Henry Louis Gates,
Jr. and then employ this alternate framework as a lens
through which I examine Pruitt-Igoe, not as a symbol of
the failure of modernism, but as a possibility for
re-reading and writing urban texts in ways that can
provide a critique of structural racism and the ways in
which architectural systems (like other social systems)
can reinforce it.
Signifyin(g) as Text
Analysis
10In The Signifying Monkey, cultural
and literary critic, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., creates a
space for cultural critique through the study of African
American literary tropes. Although Gates has applied his
framework specifically to the analysis of
African-American literary and oratorical traditions,
other scholars are applying Gates's work to a variety of
other cultural artifacts: Black English (BE), rap music,
filmmaking, television, and fashion. The application of
Gates's work to architectural criticism is not
far-fetched, particularly considering the long history of
semiotics influencing architectural theory.
The earliest connections between semiotics and
architecture emphasized a conduit metaphor to describe
communicative actsthe way buildings as well as
humans communicated. This metaphor is one that has
remained essentially uninterrogated through the modernist
period. When the earliest architectural critic,
Vitruvius, wrote "in all matters, but particularly
in architecture, there are those two points: the thing
signified and that which gives significance" (4) he
alluded to this metaphor. Much later Charles Sanders
Pierce attempted to "deal with the signification of
signs in all modes of signifying, that is the ways in
which they actually carry meaning" (Broadbent 126).
Geoffrey Broadbent, following after the rhetorical work
of C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, asserts that "any
building, at any time, can be signifier, signified, and
referentor all three simultaneously" (134). To
apply this model to the example of Pruitt-Igoe, the
referent would be the buildings themselves, problematized
somewhat because they no longer exist, but the buildings
designed by Yamasaki in 1951 and first dynamited in 1972
and finished off in 1975-6. The structures also exist in
signified form, for example photos of the site, or the
blueprints, or to a certain extent, the description of
the project that threads through this paper. The housing
scheme is also a powerful signifier; for many it is a
sign of a failed architectural scheme, for others, it
represents a set of failed (liberal) social values, and
for yet others it represents the power of a grassroots,
anti-establishment movement to dismantle a signifier of
racial oppression and hopelessness.
11In contrast, the ways in which
post-structuralist theorists like Gates would dismantle
this explanation would begin with a refutation of its
basic premise: that there is necessary relationship
between the referent, signified and signifier. Meanings
are fluid, and much of interpretation (the accepted way
of "reading" an object) is socially driven. In The
Signifying Monkey, Gates summarizes the work of
sociolinguists working in the area of BE and uses it to
develop a framework for cultural critique of
African-American rhetoric and literature. Gates's work
relates to Derrida's theories in that he sees language as
not referential or as a conduit for thought, but
metaphorical and based in negotiated meaning. Nowhere are
these qualities of language more clear than in BE, Gates
suggests, which is deeply metaphorical in that its
signification's have not historically attempted to mirror
a single referent and in many cases function as a trope,
or a play on a Standard English (SE) signifier. Because
of this rich context of multiple associations, BE is a
fluid dialect, but one that has a necessary relationship
to SE meanings. Therefore, the black concept of
signifying is only fully meaningful when contrasted with
the white term that is its homonym. According to Gates:
Thinking about the
black concept of Signifyin(g) is a bit like
stumbling unaware into a house of mirrors: the
sign itself seems to be doubled, at the very
least, and (re)doubled upon closer examination. .
. . This level of conceptual difficulty stems
fromindeed, seems to have been
intentionally inscribed withinthe selection
of the signifier "Signification" to
represent a concept remarkably different from
that concept represented by the standard English
signifier, "Signification." (44-45)
The contrast between BE
signifyin(g) and "signification" as a SE
semiotic term is important. Gates diagrams the difference
(48-49), suggesting that in BE, as in many other cultures
with strong oral/rhetorical traditions, rhetorical
figures such as metaphors are not and perhaps cannot be
separated from their signifiers, just as in SE the
signified and the signifier are traditionally linked, at
least conceptually. The relationship of
metaphor/signifyin(g), like the relationship of
signifier/signifying, is a linked set and cannot be
easily "unpacked." The metaphor becomes a part
of what defines the thing it represents.
12Gates uses his understanding of
African-American rhetorical forms to critique African
American cultural artifactsliterature, oratory and
music. His program is in part influenced by his
unwillingness to use the critical/analytical frameworks
of white culture to measure the products of black
culture. His goal is to outline for readers the important
linguistic aspects of BE, the tropes of black literature,
and to devise a framework that illuminates the
differences in black literature, celebrating its own
social/cultural/political heritage and understanding it
within those terms.
Gates employs notions of deconstructing binaries but adds
an explicit political agenda through cultural critique.
Gates provides a way of "reading"
African-American culture that "traces" historic
elements of dislocation, slavery, poverty and
discrimination and powerlessness while locating his own
analysis in rhetoric as language in action, inseparable
from the social forces constituting it. It is in this
light that I want to reexamine to Pruitt-Igoe through
Gates's framework considering the complex entanglement
among architecture, social forces and structures of
racism, creating the possibility for re-reading and
writing other urban texts in ways that provide a critique
of structural racism and the ways in which architectural
systems reinforce it.
A Second Look at
Pruitt-Igoe: Rereading the Text
13I know it seems easy to point to
Jencks's critique of modernism as simplistic, but the way
in which his argument has become the ascendant story
repeated by the popular press and even among other
architectural critics makes it necessary to at least
consider his argument. He suggests that the problem with
modernist structures is that they don't function as signs
in semiotic sense. Moreover, they especially seem foreign
and unreadable to "regular people." (Though
whether he considers the tenants of Pruitt-Igoe, who he
characterized as animalistic and destructive, to be
regular people, is indeed arguable.) One problem with
reducing the problem of Pruitt-Igoe to one of a lack of
shared codes ignores the fact that the development had
little in common with the high modernism Jencks wishes to
associate with it. We cannot ignore that though spare and
unadorned, the quality of materials and construction in
Mies's apartment towers on Chicago's lakefront provided a
stark contrast to those used in subsidized housing.
Mies's shining glass twin towers, complete with Lakeshore
Drive addresses, combined all that was beautiful in
modern architecture: shimmering glass curtain walls,
geometric unity, Italian marble floors, and perfectly
mitered steel beams. The comparison can't hold. If God
were truly in the details, God had surely abandoned the
tenants of Pruitt-Igoe.
14The details of the subsidized
housing reflected Mies's ideals in no way. The apartments
were similar in floor plan, small, with few features to
distinguish one unit from another. According to Architectural
Record's 1965, "The Case History of a
Failure," the cutbacks forced on Pruitt-Igoe before
construction began devastated the project. As problematic
as the increased density were the decreased amenities:
"The landscaping was reduced to virtually nothing
and such "luxuries" as paint on the concrete
block walls of the galleries and stairwells, insulation
on exposed steam pipes, screening over gallery windows,
and public toilets on ground floors were eliminated"
(22). The project as designed, would have made use of
contrasts between public and private space, but as built,
it offered no public spaces. The indoor public space of
the galleries was decimated by cost cutting measures and
never became the green, plant-filled, screened front
porches designers had envisioned. Children could not play
unattended because of the dangers of falls or burns from
exposed steam pipes. The only outdoor public spaces were
simply open spaces, which while designed to link the
project to the larger neighborhood, only created a
barrier. The "essential joys" essentially
isolated the complex from the citythe green-space
never materialized as landscaping was deemed too
expensive, and rivers of barren dirt served as the
buffers between the apartment buildings and the parking
lots surrounding them; the building stood as wastelands
of concrete de-militarized zone surrounded by major
streets. Because Pruitt-Igoe was built as part of a vast
urban renewal project that razed city blocks of St.
Louis, the project was left standing alone among the
ruins. Escape was difficult, for complex reasons. The
housing scheme was developed at ground zero of an urban
renewal project that created physical distance between
Pruitt-Igoe and the larger community to which it was not
even connected by sidewalks. Churches, schools and even
groceries were not easily accessible, nor were jobs or
economic opportunity. Though the modernist vision for
Pruitt-Igoe encoded it as healthful, clean, and safe, the
argument that the tenants had no access to that reading
doesn't accurately depict the situation.
15In Lee Rainwater's five year
Harvard University Study, tenants of Pruitt-Igoe reported
that most "liked their apartments very much"
found them "clean and healthy" and "the
best place they had lived" (11). However, the same
proportion also reported that their neighborhood was less
clean, less safe, and more unfriendly than any place they
had lived. Though the architectural planners had gone to
great lengths to introduce what they saw as
community-building features in the design (galleries,
etc.), community never materialized, according to
Rainwater's study. Several reasons for this are
associated with housing authority policies. Neighborhood
relations were strained in part by the housing
authority's policy of rewarding tenants who informed on
the activities of other tenants, keeping all tenants
nervous about sharing information or interacting with
their neighbors. According to Rainwater, "Tenants
are constantly expressing their concern that if neighbors
learn too much about them, and if what they know involves
something that is or seems to be in violation of the
numerous Housing Authority regulations, they may inform
the Housing Authority. . . " (113). Moreover, the
most commonly reported "crimes" in Pruitt-Igoe
were having income (which could include receiving gifts)
or living with one's husband.7 Since these are
things that a close acquaintance would likely have
awareness of, many residents avoided close relationships
with people who were not extended family members.
According to one tenant, "down here it's not the
stranger that you want to be afraid of, because you're
going to be ready for him. . . .Your friends are the ones
that'll put you in the trick" (Rainwater 21).
However, Rainwater's
survey begins to undermine Jencks's argument that
Pruitt-Igoe failed because tenants could not read the
architecture. Clearly, the tenants "read" the
apartments just as they were supposed toas clean,
healthy, etc. But the interaction of paternalistic
regulation, racist segregation, and family-destroying
welfare law made the project itself an unsafe, unfriendly
environment. According to one tenant, "They were
trying to get rid of the slum, but they didn't accomplish
too much. Inside the apartment they did, but not
outside" (12). In addition, the tenants, not being
stupid, were able to "read" the real intent of
the buildings' designers, that low-cost and low-services
were the primary design considerationsthe bottom
line. Another tenant summed this up well: "They were
trying to put a whole bunch of people in a little bitty
space. They did a pretty good jobthere's a lot of
people here" (11). In contrast to the assertion that
the signifying system of the "people" was in
conflict with the encoding system of the architects, both
comments here show a keen ability to differentiate
between the stated purpose of the housing and the actual
outcome of urban renewal. In addition, both comments show
an ironic understanding of the gap between the assertion
and reality. The second speaker is not suggesting the
housing is well designed when she comments "they did
a pretty good job," but only asserting ironically
that "they" achieved exactly what they were
trying to do when creating such high density housing.
Each speaker slyly lets the listener know she knows the
goal was to fit many people in "a little bitty
space," not to design good housing or to recreate
the functional neighborhoods that were destroyed in the
effort to tear down slum housing. Gates would identify
this as the ability to signify and read other
signifyin(g) behaviorseach speaker is doing both by
speaking the contradictions she hears spoken to her.
16Because of problems with vandalism,
within two years after its construction, armed police
officers regularly patrolled the grounds and buildings of
the complex, ostensibly to keep the peace, though their
presence served to further clear the public spaces of
people and interaction. They seemed to be protecting not
the tenants, but the property rights of the city-owners
of the complex. Heavy metal grills and chain link fences
were installed to enclose the "streets in the
sky" after two children died and another was
seriously injured in falls from upper story galleries. In
the absence of playgrounds, treeless green spaces were
read as athletic fields for children's play, and when the
green was lost to impromptu baseball diamonds and
football fields, the city chose not to maintain such
spaces. They became dirt lots, like the rest of the razed
city in which the development sat. When Rainwater asked
tenants what they thought the government was trying to
accomplish by building this housing, and what had
actually been accomplished, one woman replied she
guessed, "They were trying to better poor people
(but) they tore down one slum and built another; put all
kinds of people together; made a filthy place" (11).
But this woman could only guess at the intentions and
suggest those intentions might have been generous
"to better poor people." She really only
replied strongly when discussing the results, they
"made a filthy place." Again, here response
shows a clear understanding of the gap between intentions
and resultsand moreover, she was uncomfortable
discussing intentions because the results were so
ghastly. The recognition of this gap between rhetoric,
what the government seems to be arguing, and lived
experienced, the results of choices the government made,
is consistently clear in responses of the Pruitt-Igoe
tenants.
By the early '70s, vacancies had risen; the only tenants
who stayed were those with nowhere else to go, most often
single mothers with more that 4 children who couldn't
find accommodation in the 1-2 bedroom apartment that made
up other public housing projects. (In Pruitt-Igoe, one
and two bedroom units had a vacancy rate of nearly 42% by
this time, though 3-5 bedroom units were used to
capacity.) . The high vacancy rates increased costs and
cut maintenance. Elevators were never repaired (for that
final 3 years) leaving some tenants with 11 story climbs
with children and groceries. Soon after, the city quit
providing any services to Pruitt-Igoe, according to
tenants from the early '70s. In contrast to their earlier
constant presence, police and firefighters no longer
responded to calls. Mail carriers refused to deliver
packages, as did retail deliveries (Comerio 27). In 1972,
after extensive arson damage and years of vandalism, the
city of St. Louis dynamited three of Pruitt-Igoe's
apartment blocks. According to Kate Nesbitt, Pruitt-Igoe
was "An anti-utopian derivative which both inspires
and deserves destruction" (22). It inspired
destruction for 14 years, as tenants fought against its
prison-like constraints.
17Nesbitt focuses on the point of
juncture (or rupture) between the tenants' metaphoric
reading of Pruitt-Igoe and their destructive response to that
reading, rather than the supposedly encoded modernist
message they were supposed to respond to by developing
middle-class virtues of citizenship and hard work. Again
though, she seems aware of the tenant's ability to
correctly read the doubled message they were receiving.
The two messages function, as Gates would have it, rather
like a "hall of mirrors" (44). Each is a
distorted reflection of the otherfor on one hand
the building does claim to offer the hope of its
conservative 1950's time, that through hard work and
minimal governmental invention, anyone can pull
her/himself up. Yet "anyone," even in that
myth, meant an adequately educated white manclearly
not Pruitt-Igoe's population. The second message was
relayed more consistently, even while it was denied
through silence: that the people of Pruitt-Igoe were
dangerous, criminal, and needed to be imprisoned. For
example, the St. Louis Globe Democrat, the local
newspaper, referred to every criminal offense in the
downtown area as a "Pruitt-Igoe"
crimewhich became the local code-word for African
American. So by following Gates, it is possible to think
about "reading" not the structure, but the
point of rupture where the narrative of the dominant
culture breaks with the lived reality of African American
tenants at Pruitt-Igoe.
18In fact, Pruitt-Igoe's tenants read
the structure as if it were the prison it physically
resembled, and as if it were the prison the dominant
community attempted to shape it into. Tenant Thomas
Coolidge talked about Pruitt-Igoe in the terms one might
use to talk about a prison, conflating the signification
of the project with a prison: "To a person who
cannot afford the luxuries that a person can have,
Pruitt-Igoe is what you might say was forced upon them.
This is the last resort. . . . Yes, the environment is
very bad. If a person could get outside I'm sure he
wouldn't be here. If I could get on the outside. . .I
wouldn't be here either" (18-19). Coolidge's
discussion of Pruitt-Igoe as being "inside" and
the rest of the world as "outside" uses the
very language often used to describe being imprisoned; he
sees the project as imposed or "forced" on him
by outside forces, not as a housing choice among several.
Unsurprisingly, the tenants treated Pruitt-Igoe as if it
were this prison, not because they "misread"
the project as a prison, but because they understood that
the larger community wished them imprisonedthey
were many blocks from commercial services, unconnected by
sidewalks or public transit (the sort of infrastructure
the rest to the city had access to), and though 86% of
them claimed a desire to "get out," they were
unable to escape. Moreover, in spite of the claim that
they would like to get out, large numbers claimed fear of
the "outside." What is perhaps the most
surprising part of this scenario, and the part still
wholly uninterrogated, is the reality that Pruitt-Igoe
was not a metaphorical prison, but functioned as a prison
in fact, complete with bars on windows and doors, chain
link fences, guards, enforced segregation from the larger
community. And yet blame for the project's demise, as in
Jencks's rendition, was repeatedly placed with the
tenants themselves. For example, Yamisaki said in 1968,
"I never thought people could be that
destructive."
"Signifyin(g),"
writes Gates, "presupposes an 'encoded' intention to
say one thing but to mean quite another" (82). The
predominately African-American tenants of Pruitt-Igoe had
no difficulty reading the intention of the larger white
community because they knew they were being signified
onthat they were being told one thing that was
quite in contrast to the reality of their situation.
Gates suggests that while signifyin(g) often displays
itself in literature as a "subtle and witty use of
irony" (90) more often it manifests itself in
"establishing necessary distance between themselves
[African-Americans] and their condition to Signify upon
white racism" (94). Often such signification's
include turns on white culture and language, turns which
might even be characterized as revisions (112-113). One
way of reading the history of Pruitt-Igoe is by examining
the de(con)structive moves of the tenants as revisions of
a text representing their confinement and separation from
larger society. Graffiti, a method of marking territory
and proclaiming ownership literally rewrote the austere
facades of the complex. Repeatedly tearing down the
enclosing chain link fences could be read as an attempt
to rewrite the "prison" text, a way of at least
briefly, enlarging world views from the galleries. And as
Rainwater, Bauer, Bristol and others argue, it could
simply be read as anger toward the racist culture that
built the structures meant to contain them and limit
their lives to a few city blocks.
19According to architectural
historian David Clarke, within only a few years of first
construction, the elevators and corridors became rank
with the odor of urinewhich Clarke attributes to
the employment of skip-stop elevators in housing designed
primarily for children under 12:
With a certain
mathematical elegance, the single elevator per
building stopped at only the fourth, seventh, and
tenth floor, thus forcing a third of each
elevator's passengers to walk down either one,
two or zero stories. That's not much of a walk
(if the elevator's working) and think of the
savings! But the empiricists never put themselves
in the place of an eight-year old on the
playground with a full bladder; one for whom all
the buildings and all the entrances and all the
elevators looked alike and never left the
playground until he or she really had to. (73)
Clarke's interpretation is
no doubt in part accuratesuch innovations as the
skip-stop elevator, combined with no public, first floor
bathrooms made the project inhospitable to children (who
were the vast majority of the project's tenants,
outnumbering adults 4.5:1). However, doubtless some of
the propensity for urinating/defecating within the
buildings themselves (by children and most certainly some
adults) suggests a general hostility toward the
structures of Pruitt-Igoe and the lack of connection
these structures had to anything their inhabitants could
read as "houseness." 8 In these
actions can be traced what Gates would call "the
historical effects of dislocation," the historical
lack of "home."
20In each of these situations,
signifyin(g) is language in action, language as act; it
points to the epistemic nature of language as it focuses
on language's ability to make meaning, to bring ideas
into being. According to Gates, the act of signifyin(g)
exists
in marked contrast
to the supposed transparency of normal speech . .
. [it] turns upon the free play of language
itself, upon the displacement of meanings,
precisely because it draws attention to its
rhetorical structures and strategies and thereby
draws attention to the force of the signifier.
(53)
The violent response of
Pruitt-Igoe's tenants, who conflated their reading of the
stark, isolating institutional structure with their
readings of the structures of racism, most certainly drew
attention to the force of the signifiera
prison-like structure of racism, but never a home.
According to bell hooks, home is an especially important
concept for African-Americans: "Throughout our
history, African Americans have recognized the subversive
value of homeplace, of having access to private space
where we do not directly encounter white racist
aggression" (yearning 47). In the case of
Pruitt-Igoe and countless other public housing projects,
home becomes a metaphor for white racist
aggressionor more to the point, generations of
African-Americans are being rendered
"home"less, because the place they live cannot
be a home; they are relegated to wasteland tracts that we
must begin to view as contemporary urban reservations.
21Urban housing projects like
Pruitt-Igoe function as a sign of structural racism
because they are part of a complex social and economic
system that reinforces nihilistic behaviors by physically
enforcing barriers to the opportunities this society
affords middle-class whites. The relation of the
architectural housing programs to the structures of our
(racist) society assures that the structure of racism
will be present in our structures. Architecture was and
is informed by a series of beliefs that go nearly
uninterrogated in American culture. In "Pruitt-Igoe
and Other Stories," Mary Comerio writes, "While
it is natural for architectural critics to focus on the
stuff design is made of: space, proportion, structure,
form and other essential elements of building, it is
unnatural to ignore the social, economic, and political
structure of society that ultimately shapes what
architects do, how they do it, and why" (23). Though
this is only one start, Gates's critical program may help
provide a way for us to reread this one project as more
than design alone, to unravel the historical
entanglements between architecture and racism, and make a
space for architectural critics to find creative ways to
de(con)struct the structures of racism.
Anmerkungen:
1 Jencks's
argument in this book is for a semiotic reading of
architecturea reading he believes is possible with
post-modern architecture, which is much more clearly
referential than high modernism. Because reading high
modernism necessitates a more thorough understanding of
architectural theory and history before the viewer
understands precisely what modernism is reacting against,
Jencks and others have declared it elitist.
2 According to
Lee Rainwater's study of Pruitt-Igoe, Behind Ghetto
Walls, the average per capita income at the project
was $498 per year in 1966, making Pruitt-Igoe the poorest
of all public housing developments in St. Louis at the
time (13).
3 Mary Comerio in her article
"Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories" and Katharine
Bristol in "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth," both do an
excellent job tracing the birth of the contemporary
Pruitt-Igoe narrative from the actual history of the
project to the birth of the myththat myth being
that Pruitt-Igoe failed, at least in part, because its
tenants couldn't "read" it.
4 A project
that has been undertaken since Jane Jacobs took on the
topic in the early 1960's. In 1976 Colin Rowe and Fred
Koetter's Collage City first made the argument,
using photos of Pruitt-Igoe for the first time. Catherine
Bauer later took on the issue in a series of articles in
the Journal of Housing, arguing that the
consistent use of high-rise, high-density housing in
urban renewal projects marked the fact that business and
city officials chose profit over safe public housing. In
many cities, as in St. Louis, neighborhoods were razed
and commercial districts built in their place, while
housing was moved to the periphery of the urban center.
Bauer effectively argued that the drive for economic
profit, and its attendant problems of isolation,
high-density, a poor quality building materials, not
non-referential architecture, led to urban problems with
high modernism.
5 See Catherine
Bauer, Journal of Housing, volume 9 1952.
6 According to
the U.S. Public Housing Administration's Annual Report
in 1951, housing projects nationally faced cuts in
funding due to the expense of the Korean War and the
conservative Congress's unwillingness to more than
minimally fund any public housing. But cities, left to
disperse what little federal moneys remained available,
tended to create higher density, lower service housing in
areas to be inhabited by African Americans, according to
Arnold Hirsch's The Making of the Second Ghetto: Race
and Housing in Chicago 1940-1966. Moneys seemed to be
cut more drastically to all African American Pruitt-Igoe
than to two other integrated, lower density housing
projects being built in St. Louis at the same time.
7 In order to
qualify for AFDC and/or housing subsidies in Missouri at
this time, the female head of the household had to have
been abandoned by her husband. Simply having both parents
unemployed could not qualify a family for welfare
benefits, causing the population of Pruitt-Igoe to be
skewedof the nearly 11,000 tenants in 1966-7, only
900 were adult men.
8 According to
Rainwater's study, the apartments at Pruitt-Igoe were in
general, neat and clean. People were not
urinating/defecating inappropriately in their own
apartments.
Sources Cited:
Bailey, James.
"The Case History of a Failure." Architectural
Forum 123.12 (1965): 22-25.
Bristol, Katharine.
"The Pruitt-Igoe Myth." Journal of
Architectural Education 44.3 (1991): 163- 171.
Broadbent, Geoffrey.
"A Plain Man's Guide to the Theory of Signs in
Architecture." Theorizing a New Agenda for
Architecture, ed. Kate Nesbitt. New York:
Princeton U P, 1996.
Brolin, Brent C. The
Failure of Modern Architecture. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company: 1976.
Clarke, David. Arguments
in Favor of Sharpshooting. Beaverton, OR:
Timberland P, 1984.
Comerio, Mary C.
"Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories." Journal
of Architectural Education 34.1 (1981): 25-31.
Dyson, Michael Eric. Reflecting
Black: African American Cultural Criticism. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Gates, Henry Louis,
Jr. The Signifying Monkey. New York: Oxford U
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Hall, Stuart. "On
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hooks, bell.
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Dent. Seattle: Bay P: 1992.
-----. Talking
Back. Boston: South End P, 1989.
-----. Yearning:
race, gender, and cultural politics. Boston:
South End P, 1990.
Jencks, Charles. The
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York: Rizzoli, 1987.
Lefebvre, Henri. The
Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Morris, Charles.
"Foundations of the Theory of Signs." International
Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. II.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1938. (qted, Broadbent)
Rainwater, Lee. Behind
Ghetto Walls. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company,
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Russell, Beverly. Architecture
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"Slum Surgery In
St. Louis." Architectural Record 94.4
(1951): 128-146.
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West, Cornel.
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-----. Race Matters.
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